Archives tagged: Amazon
Sonos Inc. felt the heat of Amazon’s Alexa in the in-home wireless sound movement. What to do? If you can’t beat them, join them. Working with Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple, Sonos is planning to make smart speakers for all of them. Smart move Sonos for the increasing Smart Home.
More Wendy’s achieved another quarter of same store sales growth. Was it their sassy social media campaign that reminds detractors of the existence of refrigerators? Was it their new menu items? Or was it the fast food chain’s competitive pricing? Of the three, I think it was their social media campaign that propelled otherwise strong product and pricing strategy to outperform.
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I have seen three or four multinationals, and four to six local suppliers sell the same core product in the same country, at roughly the same price. Because there is so much competition in these markets, customers ask for discounts and drive suppliers to bid against each other to win their business. It is hard to make a stable supplier business in these situations. How can one win? And, what does value-based pricing have to contribute to these markets?
More Customer research will help small businesses to identify the best avenues for investment in terms of marketing, web design, and so forth. This is going to be especially important when the limited budgets of smaller businesses are considered. Customer research can really make or break a new business, so make sure you spend time and budget on yours.
More What better way to attract customers than with a discount? I’ll tell you what is a better way: Redefine your business into something customers actually want to engage as a first resort, not as a cheap resort.
More Prof. Haskett defines the “wheel of retailing” as the concept where retailers enter the market through low-price strategies to build market share. With the high market share, the retailer would shift its strategy from attracting new customers to increasing profit margins through higher pricing. In implementing the higher pricing strategy, the retailer opens spaced for a new lower price retailer to come into the market as the wheel turns.
More What will Gillette do? As a starter, they cut prices by 12%. Good for consumers (and society overall), bad for investors. Competition’s role is to drive prices down and quality up. This is part of the reason private capitalism is better than state-controlled enterprise.
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Our own research—that of Homburg, Jensen, and Hahn—as well as research by Hinterhuber and still other works by Liozu, repeatedly indicated firms that engage sales, marketing finance, and pricing leaders in pricing decisions outperform those that don’t. At this point, we may even call this settled managerial science.
More In The Future of Shopping, a 2011 article by Darrell Rigby—a partner in the Boston office of Bain & Company—sees retail today as part of a 50-year cycle. Rigby writes 150 years ago, the railroads promoted the growth of big cities and the rise of the department store. One hundred years ago, the automobile made possible the shopping center and 50 years ago, we saw the rise of the Big Box category killers.
More Market share is not intrinsically valuable. In the world of business, good profit dollars are what has intrinsic value. Profit dollars, earned by serving customers, are the existential purpose of a firm. Anything else is merely instrumental.
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